Oiler Mistake

- Written in June after NHL Draft     

I am convinced that the Oilers made an enormous mistake by drafting Ryan Nugent-Hopkins, with the first overall choice in this year’s NHL draft.  I am sure that RNH is a good player; shifty, good passer, clever.  However, he weighs a buck sixty. Everyone will say that he will grow, fill out, but there is no guarantee that will happen.  They had the top twelve prospects together for a picture and RNH looked like a twelve year old compared to the others.  

Now I have argued on this blog that size DOES NOT MATTER, when it comes to hockey.  I stand by that statement.  You do not have to be big to be great, but you do have to be strong and I question if RNH is or will be strong enough to be special. 

It is my thoughts that the Oilers need a top line defenseman and that Adam Larrson would have better fit their needs, than a skinny center iceman who doesn’t score very much. The Oilers defense sucked incredibly bad this year.  The times I watched the Oilers play, it was incredible how inept the defence was.  They had no one other that Whitley who could make a pass.  They all scared like they were in concrete and people went around them like swinging doors.  You couldn’t even use the excuse that they were young and just needed some maturing to improve.  They were brutal.  The only reason teams didn’t score ten goals a night against them was due to the lack of offensive talent that is prevalent in today’s NHL.  Gretzky and the boys would have scored a dozen goals a night against the Oilers this year and most of the reason would have been the statue like defenseman.  

So instead of addressing their greatest need; the Oilers decide to draft a center.  A small, skinny, non-scoring center.  The  Oilers have at least five very good young forwards to build upon.  They drafted very wisely last, not only getting the best player; Taylor Hall, but also getting three good prospects in the second round that could provide depth up front.   I am not saying that RNH is not a good young player, he is the best talent available in this year’s draft.  It is just that he is not at the level of  super prospects along the lines of Crosby, Stamkos, Ovechkin, or other top picks that everyone knew were going to be super-duper stars.  And hows did everyone know that these guys would be great?  Look at their stats as a junior players.  All of these players had size, skill, determination and more importantly; stats.  Goals and assists, and a lot of them each year.  RNH is a good passer, however this is the first year that he scored over one hundred points and most of them (75) were assists.  He isn’t a great goal scorer and will he be able to dominate NHL games as a passer?  How many people dominate in that manner?  Gretzky was a brilliant passer, but don’t forget that he scored ninety-two goals one year.  He scored over fifty several times, while getting over a hundred assists.  The game has changed you say, I agree.  It sucks remember.  Offensive ability has diminished so badly that only one player scored over fifty goals again this year.  We can go into that problem if you want but I have already written about my feelings concerning that subject.  The  bottom line is that RNH is not a ‘leading scorer in the league’ type player.  Compare him to Patrick Kane if you will, who is a nice player but no Crosby. 

So to get a big, strong, skilled, experienced defenseman, who could start playing tomorrow, is much more needed than a nice, skinny playmaker.  Rach told me that he read somewhere that defenseman chosen in the top three spots of the draft don’t develop at a rate equal to the level in which they are drafted.  Being a giant loser with more time on my hands than most, I have gone through the past twenty years of drafts and I don’t find that fact to be true. 

Sept. 2011

- training camp is just about over and RNH has had a pretty good camp, however; I will stand by my original thought and say I still think he will not be great.  I hope, I am wrong.  Edmonton hockey fans deserve a return to glory and maybe with the young players they have assembled, they will achieve it.  I still say they need a great defenseman.  By the way, I read yesterday that Adam Larrson will play for NJ this season.  Wouldn't he look good on the Oilers defence?

Jason Bonsignoir - The Continuing Story of the Modern Athlete

(I really did write a lot of blog this summer - I just didn't publish them!)

While reading the Edmonton Journal on Saturday, September 3, I was astounded by the article in the sports section which had a headline something to the extend that Jason Bonsignoir felt that Glen Sather didn’t ‘nurture’ him during his days with the Oilers.  

Nurture him?  Are you fucking kidding me?  Here is a kid that was drafted fourth overall in the NHL draft, whining because he didn’t like how he was treated by the General Manager. For those that don’t understand what being drafted means, it means that only three eighteen year old kids in the entire fucking world that were selected ahead of Bonsignoir, and with that selection, he was given the opportunity to play professional hockey for a living.  This was an opportunity for JB to make millions of dollars.  To be famous.  To be loved and adored by millions of fans.  How many of us would like that opportunity?  He gets to play a kid’s game: hockey.

And he wants to be nurtured.  He’s lucky Sather didn’t neuter him, and I don’t want to even think about what Messier would have liked to do to him!

Although millions of people would love to be in JB’s position; being successful in professional sports is a very tough thing to accomplish.  As Tom Hanks said in ‘A League Of Their Own’, “It’s supposed to be hard.  If it was easy, everyone would be able to do it!”    It takes not only great physical skills, but also emotional and mental toughness to achieve success at the professional level.  

JB never accomplished much as a  professional hockey player.  He certainly goes down as one of the biggest draft flops in history.  When you are drafted as high as JB was drafted, you are expected to not only be successful, but hopefully to be a star in the NHL.  JB never was successful with the Oilers, and he bounced around from team to team without ever making much of a mark.  His comments concerning how he was treated by Glen Sather; who I am not a big fan of either, showed why he flopped as a player.  JB obviously did not have what it takes to make it as a professional athlete.  

 JB is just another example of the youth of today.  They have been coddled, spoiled, told how fucking wonderful they are, and unprepared to deal with the reality of failure or tough times.  Instead of ‘manning up’, JB obvious blamed others for his terrible play.  He admited in the article that he was overweight and not in shape to play.  But Sather should have told him it was ok and not to worry about…right?  Nobody tells kids the truth any more because; gawd forbid, we might hurt this poor child’s self esteem.  What a crock of shit.  Kids today have so much ‘self esteem’ that it makes me want to throw up.  What kids today need is a little humility, to learn that they are not perfectly wonderful.  That they fuck up.  That doesn’t mean you have to be mean about it, but they have to get a dose of reality at some point.  

JB claims that Sather’s treatment was a kind of ‘mental abuse’.    Ohhhh, poor baby!  I am sure Sather was tough on him, however let’s not forget that when Messier fucked up in his first year, Sather sent him to the minors instantly.   Did he cry abuse?  Did he wimp around and feel sorry for himself? Not fucking likely.  He worked his way back and never, ever fucked up like that again.  In other words, he grew up and learned his lesson.  To be a pro you needed to act like a pro. 

JB claims that at his young age he needed nurturing and that Sather did a poor job handling him.  Again, I’ll say that I am no Glen Sather fan, but if you look at his track record with developing great young players (Messier, Lowe, Anderson, Coffey, Kurri, Fuhr and perhaps you heard of this guy: Gretzky!) speaks for itself.  The difference between those HOFs and JB is can be seen in the manner in which the HOFers understood what was expected of a professional hockey player and took the responsibility upon themselves to be successful. 

I would call JB a pussy, but that would be unfair to all the other pussies of the sporting world.  JB is not only a pussy, but a whinny pussy.  Even now, after his failures and being out of the game, he continues to not accept the responsibilities for his actions, or lack there of.  He didn’t have the heart/balls to be a professional athlete. Plain and simple.  He didn’t really want to be a great player.  He obviously had skills but when you don’t care that badly, or are not mentally strong enough, those weaknesses are quickly exposed when you are surrounded by tremendously self motivated and determined athletes.  Talent is never enough and to blame Sather for not being ‘nurturing’ is so pathetic.  

Baseball Dislikes

(sorry about the formatting of this page - I didn't do it and I'm too lazy to correct it)

As most of you know, I love baseball.  Basketball is my passion, but baseball is my favorite sport.  There is nothing I like more than to sit and listen to a ball game on the radio.  Watching on T.V. is ok, but to listen and have the game played out in your head is the best.  In the 70’s I used to travel to Southern California during the summer and one of my greatest memories is listening to ball games as we drove down the West Coast.  We could catch the Oakland A’s, the San Francisco Giants, the LA Angels (as they were called in those days), the Dodgers and finally the woeful Padres of San Diego.  If it was a good night you have your choice of three or four games and it was absolute bliss.  Baseball in the dark as you drove down a long highway. Nothing could be better.

Despite loving baseball, there are a few things that drive me crazy about the game.  I also have many things that I love that I will talk about after, but here are my dislikes:

•    1. Pitchers having long chains around their necks.  WTF?  Is it just me or doesn’t that seem a little grease-ball?
•    2. Players who have their pants down to the ground.  It looks like they are going to trip over their cuffs.  Looks ridiculous.  
•    3. Players wearing sunglasses upside down and on the brim of their hats.  Again, WTF is the use?
•     4. I really dislike the flat brim look that today’s players wear. Looks stupid and not what a baseball hats should look like.  Too much trying to look cool.
•     5. Guys wearing their hat brims a little cock-eyed.  Again, the only reason to do that is to look cool.  Fuck it!
•     6. Mullets.  C’mon.  Shouldn’t their trophy wives let them know that that looks stupid?
•     7. Umpires: I think that umpires in baseball are the best officials in sports; however, they do some things that piss me off.  Such as: 

•    8. Late calls.  Make your calls faster so people on T.V. know what is going on.  Tim McLelland is the worst home plate umpire in the world.  It takes him fifteen minutes to call a strike.  Despite that,  he is a great umpire.
•    9. Egging players on with arguments. Just shut up and let the player have his say and get on with the game.
•  10. Never admitting mistakes.  It is ok to say your wrong occasionally. 
•  11. Different strike zones.  Once you let refs decide what is their interpretation of the rules, caos ensues.  A common strike zone is necessary.  Just like in basketball: a foul is a foul.  Not each official’s interpretation.  The baseball strike zone is so fucking ridiculous that it is not funny.  It amounts to an area from the waist to mid thigh.  Jesus, is it any wonder that pitchers need to cheat to win games.  They don’t have a fucking chance with a strike zone that is eighteen inches high. And then you have every ump deciding the width of the zone.  Make it all the same or get robots, that’s my opinion.

•     12. Why is it ok for a pitcher to throw at a batter, or the next batter, if someone hits a home run off of him.  Is that not he batter’s job: to get a hit?  Maybe the batter should be able to throw their bat at the pitcher the next time he gets struck out?  Fair is fair.
•     13. Stealing signs.  What’s wrong with trying to steal signs from the other team?  
•     14. Really high stockings.  Baseball is to be played with stirrups and a little white showing underneath.  This is not a fucking fashion show.  High stockings look ridiculous.  
• 15. The neighbourhood play.  Middle infielders get to come close to, but not touch second base and get the out call.  Why?  Is there not rules that say a defender must touch the base to get an out?  Rules are rules. 

16. Blocking the plate or the base. This year, there has been a few incidents that resulted in high profile players getting hurt by a catcher blocking the plate.  Catchers and the runners both have been injured and questions have been raised about possibly no allowing this to happen.  I don’t understand why catchers, or any other position players are allowed to ‘block’ the base that a runner is going to.  Runners get called out if they try to avoid the tag by running out of the baseline, yet if they run directly to the base, the defender is allowed to block their path.  How is that fair?   Only at second base and home plate does this blocking seem to occur, which makes me wonder why the first baseman doesn’t block the runner on a close play.   Just sort of hip check him off the base as he gets there.

17.  Bean balls.  It you have ever been hit my a baseball anywhere on your body, you would certainly understand why getting hit in the head or face would scare the shit out of anyone.

18. Why do fans boo when the pitcher throws a pick off to a base.  Who the fuck cares?  Most of the time he is just getting a little rest, mentally and physically so shut the fuck up. 

19. The fake throw to third and wheel and throw to first.  How many times has that actually worked?  I am willing to bet that the over-under is 1/10 of a percent.  Just a fucking waste of time.  If the pitcher does it, the batter should be able to throw his bat at him (reoccurring theme of justice).

20. Begging for balls or autographs.  Jesus,  have some dignity.  What the fuck use is an autograph or a lousy ball?  Just watch the fucking game…

21.  Managers wearing uniforms.  All you have to see is Don Zimmer waddling around in a uniform to know that non-players shouldn’t wear a uniform.  Could you imagine Phil Jackson wearning a Laker uniform during the games.  Laughable. 

22. Next game, watch the players in the dugouts; they take a drink and then throw thew cups on the ground.  Can’t we have a little tidiness for once.  Someone has to pick them up at some point.  A little help please…

23.  Baseball fights are a joke.  No one ever lands a punch and it becomes a scrum, not unlike rugby.  It is so stupid. And then they suspend people. 

24. Drafting pitchers in the first round.  I have a whole blog on the futility of drafting a pitcher in the first round.  A complete and utter waste of time and money.

25 Steroids inflated stats.  To me the greatest thing about baseball is in the numbers and statistics, and what they represent.  This has now been completely and utterly fucked up by steroids.  I don’t think that steroids were necessarily cheating because there were no rules against it at the time, however; it has made all the number moot.  I still consider statistic records to be from the pre-steroid era, which means Henry Aaron, Roger Maris etc, are still the leading hitters in my opinion.  The steroid era made the playing field completely uneven.

26.  Balks.  This is the most difficult area of baseball to understand for most fans.  A balk is called when the pitchers does something (not always seen or known by the fan) to deceive the runner of the batter in some way.  I don’t understand what is the difference between deceiving a runner by making a little funny movement to get him out that to throw a funny pitch that deceive a hitter.  Fuck the balks.  Nobody knows what the hell  they are so fa-get-about-it. Nobody cares. 

27.  Artificial turf is the devil.  No stadium should have it.  As Tug McGraw once said “ Grass is for smoking and playing baseball on”. 

28.  Intentional walks.  Don’t mind them, just hate having the pitcher go through the motions of throwing four wide pitches.  Just tell the ump your walking the fucking guy and put him on the base. 

29. John Stirling.  He is the Yankee play by play guy.  He is disgusting.  Talk a bout a Yankee apologist.  And his home run calls are ridiculous.  “An A-bomb by A-Rod”.  Yuck.  And his sidekick; that women.  Turns my stomach. Another reason to hate the evil empire.  

30. Shaving cream in the face.  Ha-ha.  Very funny.  How lame is that?  After the first time seeing it, it gets old real fast.  Can’t you come up with a better way to play a joke on someone?

31. The old hot foot.  Great gag…let’s light someones shoe on fire and let it burn.  Maybe if it lasts long enough, you can cause first degree burns. 

32.  Bubble gum on the hat.  Clever.  What a sight gag.  Funny…  Seems like as waste of a good piece of gum to me. 

33.   Gatorade dump.  Another clever gag.  What could be funnier than getting drenched with a sticky liquid.  Hardy-har-har!

34. Dog piling on the hitter of a walk off home run.  How many guys have to injured before the rocket scientists of baseball figure out it may not be good for twenty-four guys to jump on one guy. 

35 Broadcasters making baseball more difficult than it really is.  It is a pretty simple game: throw the ball, hit the ball, catch the ball.  Anything more is bullshit.

36.  Batters walking in and out of the batters box.  Either in or out.  After leaving the batter’s box for the second time, the pitcher should be able to throw at him once.  Fair is fair. 

37. Batter’s box.  Why bother?  The first guys  scratches it away and it no longer is relevant.  Why bother? 

38. Tony LaRussa:  What a pompous, self-important, no sense of humour, overrated, bag of wind. And he is a red-neck on top of it. All he ever does it try to show everyone how smart he is. I fucking love when he loses.  

39. What ever happened to announcers being unbiased?  It is gross to listen to announcers piss and moan about ‘their’ team losing of getting ripped off.  Isn’t an announcer supposed to just tell the audience what is happening on the field.  Don’t give opinions, don’t evaluate, just tell me what is going on. 

40. Bats breaking.  WTF is up with the bats these days?  You used to see a guy use the same bat for a month, now you we ten bats a game get broken.  I even saw a guy hit a home run and his bat broke in half.  How long is going to be before someone gets shish kabobbed by a flying bat? Then there will be hell to play.  41.  Pitch counts.  This is the ruination of pitching. Not allowing a pitcher to throw over 120 pitches in a game is a joke.  Babying pitchers has lowered the bar for success over the last twenty years.  You will notice that in the past twenty years, only one really great pitcher has been produced (Greg Maddox), and he was the kind of a pitcher that didn’t ever throw many pitches.  Pitch counts weaken pitcher’s arms and eventually they crap out.  Did Nolan Ryan ever have a pitch count?  How about Warren Spahn or Sandy Koufax?  The greatest pitchers in history threw as many pitches as it took to win games.  And three days later they were out there again.  Three days, not four days. Today’s pitchers are pussies.  

Next: What I love About Baseball

Speed Kills Baby

Is there any law in the entire fucking world that is broken more than speeding? I defy you to name me another.  I have long figured that our friends the police could fund just about every public department if they just ticketed a higher degree of the fucking idiots that race around on our streets and roads.

I read today about the situation in Sherwood Park where (I am paraphrasing) council members (a band of fucking geniuses), have decided to stop using mobile speed traps because they don’t like the idea of just giving tickets. They don’t like the fact that the speeders aren’t given the opportunity to be ‘educated’ on the spot by a police officer when given the ticket.  What a fucking crock of shit.

People speed.  Everyone speeds.  I guarantee that 90% of the drivers speed.  Trying to educate them on the spot by a police officer is a waste of time.  That ship has sailed long ago.  People speed for three reasons, as far as I see it: 1) they are in a hurry – everyone is busy doing a millions things of which about two are important, 2) they think that the laws are for others and not them – they are more special than the next person (entitled), and the most important reason: 3) because they JUST WANT TO.  They are not going to be educated about the evils of their ways and change.  

The only way you can possibly stop people from speeding is to hit them where it hurts the most: in the wallet.  Make the fines for speeding such that people will actually think about not doing it because it will cost them a lot of money, and make it an increasing amount for repeat offenders.  If that means using a mobile box to catch a millions people speeding along, good.  

People will not be educated by words from friendly police officer.  They will only stop when they make the conscious effort of not speeding because something will happen to them financially that will effect them.  The fear of dying hasn’t stopped them.  All the fucking commercials on TV  showing horribly scarred and mangled bodies, hasn’t stopped them.  In fact more people speed now than ever.  Only the fear of losing money will have an effect on people.  

I would love to say that the AB is perfect, but I too speed, although I can guarantee that I rarely go over 10 KM above the speed limit.  If that means I get a ticket occasionally, well, I will change and drive the posted limit. But when I am driving 65 in a 60 zone and forty cars go steaming past me, something is wrong.  MDW asks me all the time, “Are you going below the speed limit?”  We all know my feeling about fucking idiots going below the speed limit so obviously that is a moot question!  

Something has to be done to stop the idiots from making the street and roads a NASCAR event.  Get a camera on every fucking corner, every road, every nook and cranny out there and catch a million people a day.  If people continue speeding, then the police department will raise enough money to fund every governmental department with enough money to make everyone happy.  

The only ones not happy will be the morons who continue to speed, and if they don’t like it; too fucking bad.  People who break the law deserve to be punished.  If they don’t like it: STOP SPEEDING.  Simple.